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Edward Snowden Didn’t Expose the NSA’s Bulk Phone Collection Program. Leslie Cauley Did.

Mother Jones

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The LA Times complains today that President Obama left someone out when he praised Congress for reforming the Patriot Act to end the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone records:

Unacknowledged by the president was the man who can fairly be called the ultimate author of this legislation: former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who has been charged with violating the Espionage Act and is now living in exile in Russia. Without Snowden’s unauthorized disclosures two years ago, neither the public nor many members of Congress would have known that the government, acting under a strained interpretation of the Patriot Act, was vacuuming up and storing millions of Americans’ telephone records. That program will end after a six-month transition period under the bill signed by Obama.

I don’t want to minimize Snowden’s contribution here. He exposed a vast amount of official secrecy and lying, and did it in a way that produced a lot of public attention. Whether you love him or hate him, he deserves a ton of credit for doing what he did.

But it’s been a long-running pet peeve of mine that hardly anyone ever credits the person who was really the first to expose the NSA’s bulk data collection program: Leslie Cauley of USA Today. Here she is in May 2006, seven years before Snowden’s disclosures:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY. The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime….The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders.

….For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others….With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans.

…..Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

The big difference between Cauley and Snowden isn’t so much in what they revealed about the bulk collection program, but simply that the world yawned at Cauley and did nothing. It wasn’t until Snowden revealed far more about the NSA’s activities that the bulk collection program finally got the attention it deserved.

Snowden deserves credit for that—and, obviously, for providing lots of concrete evidence about the nature of the program. But when it comes to exposing the bulk collection program itself? Cauley told us all about it nearly a decade ago. She’s the one who deserves credit for making it public in the first place.

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Edward Snowden Didn’t Expose the NSA’s Bulk Phone Collection Program. Leslie Cauley Did.

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Will the Washington Post Destroy "Incidental" NSA Intercepts When It’s Done With Them?

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago the Washington Post published an article based on a cache of thousands of surveillance intercepts that it got from Edward Snowden. That produced the suggestion—not widespread, I think, but still out there—that the Post was now violating privacy just like the NSA has been. Glenn Greenwald thought this was pretty dumb, but Julian Sanchez wasn’t so sure:

Doesn’t seem TOTALLY frivolous. I hope you & WaPo are destroying copies of intimate communications once reporting’s done.

This is actually….a good point. The charge against the NSA isn’t just that it ends up surveilling thousands of innocent people who are merely innocent bystanders in court-approved investigations. Even critics concede that this is inevitable to some extent. The problem is that once the NSA has collected all these “incidental” intercepts, they keep them forever in their databases and make them available to other law enforcement agencies for whatever use they want to make of them. At the very least, privacy advocates would like these incidental collections to be destroyed after they’ve served their immediate purpose.

So will the Post do this? Once they’ve finished their immediate reporting on this, will they destroy these intercepts? Or will they keep them around for the same reason the NSA does: because, hey, they have them, and you never know if they might come in handy some day?

There’s always been a tension inherent in Edward Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s surveillance programs: Who gets to decide? You may think, as I do, that the government has repeatedly shown itself to be an unreliable judge of how much the public should know about its mass surveillance programs. But who should it be instead? Snowden? Glenn Greenwald? The Washington Post? Who elected them to make these decisions? Why should we trust their judgment?

It’s not a question with a satisfying answer. Sometimes you just have to muddle along and, in this case, hope that the whistleblowers end up producing a net benefit to the public discourse. But in this case, we don’t have to muddle. This is a very specific question, and we should all be interested in the answer. Do Greenwald and the Post plan to destroy these private communications once they’re done with them? Or will they hold on to them forever, just like the NSA?

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, there’s a difference here. On the one hand, we have the government, with its vast law-enforcement powers, holding onto massive and growing amounts of incidental surveillance. On the other we have a private actor with a small sample of this surveillance. We should legitimately be more concerned with possible abuses of power by the government, both generally, and in this case, very specifically. But that’s a starting point, not the end of the conversation. Sanchez is still asking a good question.

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Will the Washington Post Destroy "Incidental" NSA Intercepts When It’s Done With Them?

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NSA Fires Back at Snowden and Claims His Email Didn’t Raise “Concerns About Wrongdoing”

Mother Jones

Update, Thursday, 2:25 EDT: The NSA has released the email it received from Edward Snowden on April 5, 2013. In the email, Snowden posed questions regarding a training session. He asked whether presidential executive orders supersede federal laws. He also asked about Department of Defense regulations and Office of Director of National Intelligence rules, wondering which has greater precedence. This email did not refer to any concerns about NSA surveillance programs. Three days later, the general counsel’s office replied that EOs “cannot override a statute” and that DOD and ODNI regulations “are afforded similar precedence.” The email noted, “please give me a call if you would like to discuss further.”

The National Security Agency is firing back against former contractor Edward Snowden, who insists he reported his concerns about illegal surveillance activity directly to the agency in writing before leaking his treasure trove of super-secret documents. The NSA says it will today release an email it received from Snowden that undercuts his assertion.

Snowden’s Odd Email to the NSA Deepens the Mystery

Snowden has maintained that he alerted intelligence officials internally more than “10 times” about his concerns about NSA activities prior to becoming a leaker. Last night, as part of its interview with Snowden, NBC reported that two US officials confirmed that Snowden had sent at least one email to the NSA’s general counsel raising “policy and legal questions.” The network’s revelation drew attention; the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald called it the “biggest news” from the interview. After all, NSA officials have previously denied that Snowden reported wrongdoing to senior officials. In a speech on April 15 in Tampa, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that “Snowden isn’t a whistleblower.” He asserted that Snowden “could have reported concerns to seniors at NSA…he chose not to go to any of those places.”

Now that NBC has confirmed that Snowden did contact the NSA legal brass—undermining the NSA’s previous claims—the agency is acknowledging that it heard from the contractor before the leaks. But it is claiming that Snowden’s communication with the general counsel’s office does not back up his story.

On Thursday, in an email sent to Mother Jones, NSA spokeswoman Marci Green Miller said that the NSA has “found one email inquiry by Edward Snowden to the office of General Counsel asking for an explanation of some material that was in a training course he had just completed. The e-mail did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed. There was not additional follow-up noted.”

She added, “There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations. We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims.”

She noted the NSA will make the email public later today.

Given that Clapper and the NSA previously denied that Snowden had made any contact with the higher-ups, the agency’s discovery and release of this email will certainly be seen as somewhat suspicious by some. But Snowden’s claim and the NSA’s response are now good material for his next interview.

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NSA Fires Back at Snowden and Claims His Email Didn’t Raise “Concerns About Wrongdoing”

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New Audio: Listen to Edward Snowden Defend Whistleblowers

Mother Jones

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Edward Snowden beamed into DC from Russia Wednesday afternoon to accept the Ridenhour Prize for “truth-telling,” speaking before a crowd at the National Press Club via a Google+ hangout. Snowden’s lawyer and his father sat at a table in the front row and accepted the award on his behalf.

“A year ago there was no way I could have imagined being here, being honored in this room,” Snowden said to open his remarks. “When I began this, I never expected to receive the level of support that I did from the public. Having seen what happened to the people that came before, specifically Thomas Drake, it was an intimidating thing.” Drake is a former high-level employee at the National Security Agency who was vigorously prosecuted after revealing waste and mismanagement at the agency. “I’d realized that the highest likelihood, the most likely outcome of returning this information to public hands would be that I would spend the rest of my life in prison,” Snowden said. “I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.”

When asked what advice he would give to the next potential whistleblower who wants to expose wrongdoing in the intelligence community, Snowden said that there needed to be systematic changes; otherwise that whistleblower would be forced into exile like him. “Thomas Drake showed us that even if you’re a real classic whistleblower revealing waste, fraud, and abuse in a program… there’s a very good chance the FBI will kick in your door, pull you out of the shower naked at gunpoint in front of your family, and ruin your life,” he said. Instead, Snowden suggested that Congress needed to add safeguards to encourage people to come forward. “Work with Congress in advance to try to make sure that we have reformed laws,” he said, “that we have better protections, that all these shortcomings and failures in our oversight infrastructure are addressed so that the next time that we have an American whistleblower who has something that the public needs to know, they can go to their lawyer’s office instead of the airport. Right now I’m not sure they have a real alternative.”

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New Audio: Listen to Edward Snowden Defend Whistleblowers

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"24: Live Another Day" Will Deal With US Drone Warfare

Mother Jones

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Last Friday, Fox posted a new trailer for 24: Live Another Day, the upcoming limited event series that continues the famous Jack Bauer action saga (which wrapped its initial eight-season run in 2010). The show, starring Kiefer Sutherland as counterterrorism agent Bauer, came on the air just two months after 9/11, and frequently incorporated the political debates and context of the post-9/11 world. 24 got a reputation for right-wing Bush-era messaging (Bauer tortures a whole lot of people, and often extracts the world-saving information he needs very quickly), but also featured oilmen, shady business interests, and Republican politicians at the center of terrorist conspiracies.

Flash-forward to 2014, and you’ll find 24‘s political framing has adjusted accordingly with the times. In the new trailer, you’ll catch a brief shot of an anti-drone protest in London during the US president’s visit. “Drones DESTROY our Humanity,” and so forth, the placards read:

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“We have analogues for the Snowden affair and the drone issue is a backdrop,” executive producer Howard Gordon said earlier this year.

In Live Another Day, the drone-warrior president is James Heller (played by William Devane), who served as Secretary of Defense under two Republican presidents, and first appeared in season four. (Devane also played the President of the United States in The Dark Knight Rises.) During the fourth season of 24, Heller criticizes Michael Moore, and later signs off on the torture of his gay, anti-American son on suspicions that he’s in contact with Muslim extremists.

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"24: Live Another Day" Will Deal With US Drone Warfare

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